To commemorate the release of Angel Olsen’s sixth studio album, ‘Big Time’, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy has shared a lo-fi acoustic cover of its title track.
- READ MORE: Soundtrack Of My Life: Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy
Tweedy’s raw, weathered vocals fit the song affably, retaining the original version’s smoky and melancholic spirit. He shared the cover on his Substack blog, Starship Casual, where he wrote: “Normally I put songs behind the paywall, but this album is brand-new and lovely, and I want everyone with ears to hear it.”
Have a listen to the cover here, and see Olsen’s response to it below:
Jeff!!! Covering “Big Time”!
I owe you one @JeffTweedy https://t.co/5t9yG0QI5j
— Angel Olsen (@AngelOlsen) June 4, 2022
This isn’t the first time Tweedy’s put his own spin on one of Olsen’s tunes – almost exactly a year ago, he and his son Spencer covered her joint single with Sharon Van Etten, ‘Like I Used To’. The singer, songwriter, author and producer has long had an affinity for cover songs, with some of his recent standouts being Neil Young’s ‘The Old Country Waltz’, the Ted Lasso theme song and Japanese Breakfast’s ‘Kokomo, IN’.
‘Big Time’ was released last Friday (June 3) via Jagjaguwar. In addition to the title track – which Olsen released as its second single back in April – the album features ‘All The Good Times’ and ‘Through The Fires’. It’s the follow-up to 2020’s ‘Whole New Mess’, which featured re-workings of tracks from Olsen’s 2019 LP, ‘All Mirrors’.
NME gave the new album a four-star review, with Patrick Clarke calling it “a record of huge emotional range” and opining that “[Olsen’s] Midwestern croon is so impeccably suited to this kind of music that it’s a wonder she ever sang any other way”.
Wilco, on the other hand, released their 12th album, ‘Cruel Country’, last month via their own dBpm Records imprint. Clarke also gave that record a four-star review, writing that it sees Wilco “lean into country music wholeheartedly, albeit on their own terms”, but while “the tried-and-tested country music tropes are employed subtly”, the band “clearly [take] care to avoid pastiche”.
The post Listen to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy cover Angel Olsen’s ‘Big Time’ appeared first on NME.
